published the most exciting paper of my career so far. the new health reform law expands private insurance to cover an additional 24 million americans. who are they? if they're going to be your new group of patients, you might want to know.

got quoted in congressional quarterly's healthbeat newsletter. "no, said anthony damico, one of the authors of the study."

like this time of year.

watched a double-header on deep sea conservation with mark. apparently, bioluminescence is the most important communication tool in the history of life. also started whale wars, led by one of the founders of greenpeace - later kicked out for being too radical. they throw butyric acid onto japanese fishing boats to ruin a catch.

said sayonara to kirsten yet again, but this time over the best food in town. she's leaving for switzerland to figure out what to do with the new malaria vaccine.

realized the misleading nature of two-dimensional maps, especially when comparing distances in equatorial vs. more polar regions. for example: the way the crow flies, miami to seattle is only about one hundred miles further than the east-west length of brazil.

my supervisors were supremely uninterested in public performance of any sort. it was not that they were indifferent to exam results; they simply took it for granted that our natural talent would carry us through.

universities are elitist: they are about selecting the most able cohort of a generation and educating them to their ability—breaking open the elite and making it consistently anew. equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not the same thing.

ruled that the first amendment permits congress to imprison human rights activists for up to fifteen years merely for advising militant organizations on ways to reject violence and pursue their disputes through lawful means.

if we are going to reduce the cost of medical care significantly, physicians will have to change the ways they now use all medical resources, whether drugs, diagnostic tests, surgical procedures, or hospital facilities.

the use of medical resources in the us is not determined by the interplay between supply and demand, but mainly by supply.

baltimore as a total system, in which every neighborhood and every institution exist in some relation to every other and people behave according to the incentives and choices they find set before them, more than according to whether they are good guys or bad guys.

in a single battle lasting 21 days..kabul is destroyed as a functioning city, and as a consequence 'culture in all its forms dies. the theatre dies and the magazines and newspapers die, the bookshops and the archives and the museums die'

cheap and highly subsidized american corn flooded the mexican market. local farmers were unable to compete: 1.1 million small farmers and 1.4 million others dependent on the agricultural sector lost their livelihoods.

nearly a third of americans actually agreed that it was "definitely" or "probably" true that obama "sympathizes with the goals of islamic fundamentalists who want to impose islamic law around the world."

sainted reagan ran deficits in six of his eight presidential years.

from 1950 to 1963..the top marginal rate on very-high-income earners..was just over 90 percent.

a former us marine..charged with premeditated murder (then dubiously acquitted for lack of evidence) after firing 60 rounds into two unarmed iraqi detainees in april 2004, has just stood for congress in north carolina's seventh district (he lost).

when challenged on the o'reilly factor in august, beck reiterated his libertarian credo that "if it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?" when o'reilly insisted that gay marriage was a menace, beck mugged a frightened face, stared into the camera, and asked, "will the gays come and get us?"

in our rural areas people are still using oxcarts. oxcarts are in museums in thailand. if you take a photo of a village in burma with its thatched huts and rutted roads, it looks exactly as it would have a hundred years ago.

the state spends less than 1 percent of its budget on education and health care combined.